![]() ![]() Harvesting Sweet PotatoesĪfter 3 or 4 months of growing, sweet potato tubers will be ready for harvest. The best part is that you can enjoy sweet potato leaves while waiting for the tubers to mature – check out this article from UC Davis to learn more. Sweet potato leaves may be a little bitter, but they have lots of nutrients. Don’t forget to add some garlic and onions sautéed in olive oil to go with the leaves! ![]() You can also steam sweet potato leaves like spinach. You can use them fresh in salad as “greens”, to replace lettuce, and put some dressing on them. Can You Eat Sweet Potato Leaves (Greens)? Potatoes and yams are also root vegetables that grow their tubers in the ground, and they are both different from sweet potatoes. Note: sweet potatoes are a type of root vegetable. Slips grow from a sweet potato tuber after it sprouts.ĭo you want to grow your own sweet potatoes? If so, you can learn all about planting sprouted sweet potatoes in my article here. Sweet potato slips are vine pieces with two or more leaves. However, a freeze will kill will them, and they do not tolerate frost well.Īs a result, sweet potatoes are usually grown as annuals and planted every year from sweet potato slips. Sweet potatoes are perennial, meaning that they are capable of growing back year after year. However, these flowers usually only appear in areas where there are less than 11 hours of daylight per day. You may want to drive the stakes into the ground before planting a sweet potato plant, to avoid damaging the roots of the plant. One way to support sweet potato vines is to plant them at the base of a trellis and let them climb.Īnother option is to drive stakes into the ground, just like you would with tomatoes. This can be helpful in a small garden or when using container gardening or square foot gardening, where space is at a premium. However, you can give sweet potatoes support and secure them to allow climbing. Sweet potato vines prefer to crawl along the ground, similar to tomatoes or bush beans. Sweet potato vines can climb, but they do not climb naturally. ![]() Another way to produce more sweet potato plants is by using slips, which sprout from the tubers (more on this later). Or, you can keep the vine in water instead and grow it as a houseplant. You can later transplant the rooted cutting into soil to grow a new sweet potato plant. A vine cutting placed in water will form roots and grow. If you like, you can use cuttings from a sweet potato vine to produce more plants. In fact, the leaves create so much shade that weeds often have trouble growing near sweet potatoes! The vines cover lots of ground very quickly. The vines of sweet potato plants tend to crawl along the ground as they grow in every direction. Sweet potato vines (background) grow above ground, while the tubers (center) grow below ground. ![]()
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